Fernea in Morocco: the women's exotic world

The engagement of western writers with Morocco is part and parcel of a wider long-running encounter with exotic cultures. The exotic world and its chanting appeals stimulated the interest of a host of travel writers and anthropologists around the globe. American travel writers and feminists in particular were very much concerned with the exoticist and orientalist appeals associated with North Africa. Elizabeth Fernea best represents this vogue. She travelled to Morocco to embrace a new cultural otherness. Her travel account: A Street in Marrakech (1975) best represents her assessment of the Moroccan diverse exotic contours as a belated American feminist writer looking for a completely different cultural otherness. This paper is an attempt to interpret Fernea's encounters with the Moroccan women and to see whether their world is really a prototype of the common mysterious and exotic oriental world.